Give me an R! It’s Read Free Fortnight at The Diary of a Nobody.
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, January 20
Well, after a couple-three weeks of rolling with a yellow highlighter for marking his cash drawer spreadsheets, Mark went with the pink highlighter tonight…Curious – perhaps more curious than anyone really should be about the matter – I did some snooping around Mark’s preferred left computer station at the front desk and found the pink highlighter to be the most conveniently located…An orange one was nearby, but he would have had to have moved some pens out of the way to get to it, so you can see why he went with the pink one…There wasn’t a yellow one to be seen.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t do a whole lot of work today at the Veterans Service Office (VSO), preferring to watch the inaugural instead…Not that there was a whole lot to do, what with the county building still being closed and whatnot…There were no emails nor phone messages demanding attention, so I was able to dive right in.
The only problem was ol’ Sparrow – who hasn’t owned a TV since 1998 – wasn’t particularly in the mood to listen to network TV blather, so some searching was in order…The BBC was a nice option but some further work yielded the good fortune of the official YouTube feed of the Congressional committee that organizes the inaugural…It was hosted by, get this, two Capitol tour guides (Janet and Ron) and while this might cause a chuckle, they did a really good job…There wasn’t too much yapping and zero partisanship at all as the pair preferred to chat about assorted historical elements of the inaugural ceremony and the capitol itself…All in all, it was a rather pleasant way to watch the ceremony.
Someone actually called me during the inaugural!!
I am not making that up.
President Biden was in the middle of his speech when the phone rang…I looked at the number, just for funsies, and didn’t recognize it not that it mattered because I wouldn’t have answered it anyway…The new president was giving his inaugural address for Pete’s sake and it was my duty as a citizen to listen…(I thought it was really, really good, too)…It turned out to be a woman wondering what the VA could do for her 93-year-old father who needs in-home care.
Well, regular readers of this crap know this depends primarily on the financial situation of the veteran…The VA itself doesn’t provide in-home care, but they do pay what’s called aid and attendance for vets that can no longer take care of themselves and the amount varies depending on the vet’s level of dependence.
Eligibility for the programs, tho, is reserved for those of rather limited means: a yearly income below the poverty level and combined assets, not including a house or a car, of $127,000 or so…As it was, I called her back after yet another peaceful transfer of power and she didn’t see fit to take my call, so I left a message.
There was another phone call, too, from Ms W…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that in October or November I helped her father, Mr W…He’d called me looking to sign up for VA medical care and I actually had to make a house call to get him to sign the appropriate forms and his house, a bit north of town, was falling apart and so was Mr W because he died a couple of weeks later…His daughter wants to know what burial benefits are available and she said she’d be in town Friday and we decided to meet somewhere then and talk about it.
The cat is getting even more tactical in her quest to eat something other than the dry food that is always available…Recall the cat’s been getting half a can of yummies recently, instead of a full can, which has accomplished the goal of getting her to puke less and on the days when a new can is opened the remainder is put in a baggie and refrigerated for tomorrow.
Needless to say, ol’ Sparrow was not always regular about bagging up the leftover yummies and the cat soon caught on to this and would immediately bolt back to the kitchen table to eat what she could out of the can before resuming feasting on what I had put into her bowl.
Well, she has also learned it is not completely out of the question for Daddy to fix something for himself to eat when he gets home, so now she is in the habit – and this is pretty funny – of pretending to eat while sneaking glances at me to see if I’m busy in the kitchen because she doesn’t the see the point in wasting stomach space on mere canned cat food when Daddy might have something tasty to share in short order.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: As usual for Wednesday, there is not any sleep to report today.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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